It was clearly a very popular machine with users; there was no real business case for producing clones, and yet there were no less than 3 companies that attempted PDP-10 clones -- one of them in the mid 1990's! -- in addition to the one-off clone at Xerox PARC. Ritche and Thompson wanted one at Bell Labs to develop early Unix (and settled for a PDP-11 instead). And DEC threw it completely away in 1983 by stopping development on the successor machines. They could have done one at least more generation, and it would have been at least a modest success and kept some of those users on board the DEC train.

> The Righteous 3D had mechanical relays that clicked audibly when you were using it

Interesting! I assume these had something to do with bridging to the 2D graphics card? I found other references on the web to the relays clicking, but not an explanation of what the relays are doing, or how often you'd actually hear them in practice.

Author's website is here

http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/

This was the Mac's answer to Doom back in the day. Huge during Mac LAN parties of the era.

Seems like practically everybody who had a microcomputer with a disk drive in the early 80's had a version of this and a version of Zork I.

Some good commentary here on the Apple II's BASIC graphics primitives https://github.com/fadden/fdraw/blob/master/docs/manual.md

quote below from the Lines section ---

The Applesoft routine isn't quite the same as the standard Bresenham algorithm, because it doesn't move diagonally. Consider a line from (0,0) to (50,10) -- gently sloping down and to the right. The standard algorithm would plot exactly 51 pixels, one in each horizontal position. The "pen" always moves one pixel right, but sometimes also moves down.

In Applesoft, the "pen" can move either right or down, but can't do both at once. This results in lines that feel thin when near horizontal or vertical, but become thicker as they approach 45 degrees. This reduces performance, because Applesoft draws twice as many pixels for a diagonal line as the basic algorithm. It can also be visually jarring when animated, because lines get very thick when near diagonal.

This is a fascinating document. This was like a year after Windows 3.1 started eating the PC world, and a year before NeXT threw in the towel on hardware entirely, and approx. three years before the Internet became mainstream.

John Perry Barlow is the interviewer, very tech savvy, and he seems to have been convinced NeXT had finally figured it all out and was going to make it big in the business world. Didn't really see Windows coming, I guess, or didn't understand that high-end PC hardware would rapidly become cheap enough to make NeXT's hardware irrelevant in that space.

The two things that stunted Java from a creative-projects perspective were (a) nobody built a native (x86 / PowerPC / etc) compiler for it early on and (b) the UI class library was utter garbage.

(a) People got way too enamored with the runtime possibilities and didn't see the opportunity to replace C++ -- by the mid-90's the serious C++ footguns were certainly widely recognized -- with a better language.

(b) I still don't know why anyone at Sun thought AWT was acceptable. They literally bought a superior class library from another company and threw it away. And every attempt to fix it became this endless parade of crap grafted on top of AWT.

Get a Mac? You could certainly take screenshots on the Mac by the late 1980's.

It's really a shame that Unix ate the world. I've never had a chance to use Pascal in a professional context (other than reading old code) because C/C++ had taken over for OS development by that point.